SAT Guide : VOCABULARY - DOES IT MATTER?

IN A WORD: YES.

Vocabulary as such is not tested on the SAT. Until a few years ago, the exam included antonym questions, which required you to pick a word whose meaning was the opposite of some other word. Those questions have been eliminated. So the most direct and obvious form of a vocabulary question on the SAT is no more.
That leaves indirect and hidden vocabulary questions—of which there are plenty ;

1. Reading comprehension passages now include vocabulary-in-context questions. These focus on particular words in the passage and ask you to determine their meaning in the passage. Sometimes the words chosen are obviously “hard” words (latent, replete, and eminent, to name three real examples). More often, they are seemingly “easy” words that are tricky because they have so many possible meanings (camp, idea, and hard, for example). In both cases, the broader, more varied, and more accurate your vocabulary knowledge, the better your chances are of answering these questions quickly and correctly.
2. The better your vocabulary knowledge, the easier you’ll find it to understand both the critical reading passages and the sentence completion items (which are, in effect, mini-passages, each one sentence long). Even an occasional math item is made a little more complicated by the use of a challenging vocabulary word.

Therefore, vocabulary knowledge makes a clear and significant difference in your performance on the SAT. Fortunately, the kinds of words that regularly appear on the SAT, as with so much else on the exam, fall into definite patterns.

The SAT is basically a test of “book learning.” It’s written and edited by bookish people for the benefit of the other bookish people who run colleges and universities. It’s designed to test your ability to handle the kinds of academic tasks college students usually have to master: reading textbooks, finding information in reference books, deciphering scholarly journals, studying research abstracts, writing impressive sounding term papers, and so forth.

The hard words on the SAT are hard words of a particular sort: scholastic words that deal, broadly speaking, with the manipulation and communication of ideas—words like ambiguous, amplify, arbitrary, and arcane. The better you master this sort of vocabulary, the better you’ll do on the exam.

Fortunately, you don’t need to find these words on your own. We’ve done the spadework for you. By examining actual SAT exams from the last several years, we’ve been able to list the words most commonly used in reading passages and sentence completions, including both the question stems and the answer choices.

This list became the basis of the SAT Word List, which can be found in the appendix. It includes about 500 primary words that are most likely to appear in one form or another on your SAT exam. It also includes
hundreds of related words—words that are either variants of the primary words (ambiguity as a variant of ambiguous, for example) or that share a common word root (like ample, amplify, and amplitude).

If you make yourself acquainted with all the words in the SAT Word List, you will absolutely learn a number of new words that will appear on your SAT. You’ll earn extra points as a result.
Read More : SAT Guide : VOCABULARY - DOES IT MATTER?

The Best Vocabulary-Building Tips For The SAT

STUDY VOCABULARY DAILY
There are some topics you can easily cram. Vocabulary isn’t one of them. In general, words don’t stay in mind until the fourth or fifth time you learn them. Try to begin your vocabulary study several weeks before the exam. Take 15 or 20 minutes a day to learn new words. Periodically review all the words you’ve previously studied; quiz yourself, or have a friend quiz you. This simple regimen can enable you to learn several hundred new words before you take the SAT.

LEARN A FEW WORDS AT A TIME
Don’t try to gobble dozens of words in one sitting. They’re likely to blur into an indistinguishable mass. Instead, pick a reasonable quantity—say, ten to fifteen words—and study them in some depth. Learn the definition of each word; examine the sample sentence provided in the Word List; learn the related words; and try writing a couple of sentences of your own that include the word. Refer to your own dictionary for further information if you like.

LEARN WORDS IN FAMILIES
Language is a living thing. Words are used by humans, innately creative beings who constantly twist, reshape, invent, and recombine words. (Think of the jargon of your favorite sport or hobby, or the language that has blossomed in cyberspace in recent years.) As a result, most words belong to families, in which related ideas are expressed through related words. This makes it possible to learn several words each time you learn one.

In the SAT Word List, we’ve provided some of the family linkages to help you. For example, you’ll find the adjective anachronistic in the word list. It means “out of the proper time,” as illustrated by the sample sentence: The reference, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, to “the clock striking twelve” is anachronistic, since there were no striking timepieces in ancient Rome.

When you meet this word, you should also get to know its close kinfolk. The noun anachronism means something that is out of its proper time. The clock in Julius Caesar, for example, is an anachronism; in another way, so are the knickers worn by modern baseball players, which reflect a style in men’s fashions that went out of date generations ago. When you learn the adjective, learn the noun (and/or verb) that goes with it at the same time.

BECOME A WORD ROOT TRACER
The two words we just discussed anachronistic and anachronism are like brother and sister. Slightly more distant relatives can be located and learned through the “Word Origin” feature you’ll find near many of the words in the list. The origin for anachronistic connects this word to its source from another language: the Greek word chronos means time. Ultimately, this is the root from which the English word anachronistic grows.

As you explore the word origins, you’ll find that many words especially bookish SAT words—come from roots in Latin and Greek. There are complicated (and interesting) historical reasons for this, but the nub is that, for several centuries, learned people in England and America knew ancient Latin and Greek and deliberately imported words from those languages into English.

They rarely imported just one word from a given root. Thus, many word roots can enable you to learn several English words at once. The word origin for anachronistic tells you that chronos is also the source of the English words chronic, chronicle, chronograph, chronology, and synchronize. All of these have to do with the concept of time:

• Chronic means lasting a long time
• A chronicle is a record of events over a period of time
• A chronograph is a clock or watch
• Chronology is a timeline
• Synchronize means to make two things happen at the same time

Learning the word root chronos can help you in several ways. It will make it easier to learn all the words in the chronos family, as opposed to trying to learn them one at a time. It will help you to remember the meanings of chronos words if they turn up on the exam, and it may even help you to guess the meaning of an entirely new chronos word when you encounter it.

USE THE WORDS YOU LEARN
Make a deliberate effort to include the new words you’re learning in your daily speech and writing. It will help solidify your memory of the words and their meanings. Maybe you’ve heard this tip about meeting new people: If you use a new acquaintance’s name several times, you’re unlikely to forget it. The same is true with new words: Use them, and you won’t lose them.

CREATE YOUR OWN WORD LIST
Get into the habit of reading a little every day with your dictionary nearby. When you encounter a new word in a newspaper, magazine, or book, look it up. Then jot down the new word, its definition, and the sentence in which you encountered it in a notebook set aside for this purpose. Review your vocabulary notebook periodically—say, once a week. This is a great way to supplement our SAT Word List, because it’s personally tailored. Your notebook will reflect the kinds of things you read and the words you find most difficult. The fact that you’ve taken the time and made the effort to write down the words and their meanings will help to fix them in your memory. Chances are good that you’ll encounter a few words from your vocabulary notebook on the exam.
Read More : The Best Vocabulary-Building Tips For The SAT